Why not speak like the neighbours : linguistic variation as a social marker

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It is obvious to speakers of any language that language changes. The schoolchildren who
think Shakespeare wrote in ‘Old English’ are more likely to be dismayed by the difficulty
of reading Early Modern English than surprised that Hamlet, or even Bottom, does not
speak as they do. Similarly, their parents would probably be taken aback if they found
their offspring’s speech and vocabulary to be exact replicas of their own. Why languages
change is a matter of less certainty. In a sense, of course, that statement is not quite
accurate. A short browse of comments on the website of the BBC’s Voices project
reveals that while modern linguists may disagree about the reasons for language change,
many non-linguists are quite certain they know why: laziness and sloppiness, encouraged
in Britain by the corrupting influence of American and Australian television. It would
seem that to most people, linguistic change is far from being a positive thing - an attitude
that is even preserved in such words as etymology, from Greek ετυμος ‘true’. As McMahon
(1999: 315-6) and Labov (2001: 10-11) note, the notion of linguistic change as primarily a
process of decay was prevalent among nineteenth-century linguists. Labov (2001: 4)
even uses rather negative language himself (though apparently more out of sympathy for
the emotional responses of his subjects than for the classicism of his distant
predecessors), dramatically describing the effects of language change as ranging ‘from
petty inconveniences to crushing disabilities that can consume years of our lives with
unrewarding struggle against hopeless odds.’ He notes that where changes are observed,
the reaction is ‘uniformly negative’ and that this, significantly, is in contrast to the attitude of those older people who welcome such innovations as new technologies and music;
their applause is never extended to new ways of speaking.
Just as the first chapter of most introductory textbooks on syntax stresses the
difference between what most people think grammar is (prescriptive) and what linguists
mean by it (descriptive), there is a tendency for books that introduce the fundamentals of
sociolinguistics or language change to comment on the attitudinal divide described
above. What is less often noted, though not unrecognised, is the possibility that this very
attitude provides a clue to why language changes. More precisely, there are good
reasons for believing that language change is closely connected to social factors such as
identity and status. In the desire of the young to distance themselves from their parents,
or that of a particular clique, profession, or nation to distinguish itself from another,
there is a stimulus to innovation. In the desire to talk like one’s peers, or ‘betters’ (or
even, in some cases, one’s ‘inferiors’), there is reason for innovations to be propagated.
Of course, if the imitation is not perfect – in cases of hypercorrection, for example -
there may even be further innovation, followed by further propagation and so on. In any case, the issue of group membership highlights the relevance of
negative attitudes to change. If individual speech patterns are a marker of both
membership and non-membership, then they can be threatening, for where they differ
from the speaker’s own modes of expression, they imply his exclusion from something.
The experience of being excluded by a younger generation of one’s own compatriots is
particularly unpleasant – ‘It’s fine for Americans to speak like that; I know I’m not part
of that group and I don’t want to be! But when my own children start speaking like
them, well….’
There is another side to this. After the 7 July terrorist bombings in London, one
of the most disturbing aspects of the situation for many commentators seems to have
been the fact that the bombers were British; most tellingly, several commented explicitly
on the fact that the bombers and their supporters spoke with Yorkshire accents. It seems
relevant to quote Bennett and Royle’s (1999: 40) definition of ‘uncanny’ as ‘those
situations when the homely becomes unhomely, when the familiar becomes unfamiliar or
the unfamiliar becomes strangely familiar.’ Speech patterns are clearly of the greatest
importance in telling outsider from fellow, and where this is undermined, the listener is
disturbed.
This all raises a further question: why should it be so important to identify
individuals as belonging or not belonging to a group; or indeed to assert one’s own
membership? It would seem that this serves an evolutionary purpose. As the size of
hominin social groups increased beyond the point that individuals could immediately
recognise other members of their own group, populations became increasingly at risk
from cheats, or free-riders – infiltrators who take advantage of a group’s resources before
disappearing without making any contribution to the group themselves. They may even
cause sabotage. Identification of such free-riders is crucial, therefore.